ABSTRACT

Carving up cinema into ages is, of course, fraught with problematics, not least of which is the danger of historicism. This first epoch (1895-1929) does, however, have some inherent logic because it marks the period between the cinema’s first commercial screening (the Lumière brothers exhibited 12 of their cinematograph productions in the Salon des Indiens, boulevard des Capucines in Paris and charged an entrance fee) and the advent of sound, which at first dramatically disrupted the codes and conventions of narrative film and quite obviously inflected the course of cinema’s history. I am tempted to call this first age of French cinema the classical age precisely because it does put in place most of the codes and conventions of this medium that subsequent ages have either reacted against or gone on to develop in different ways. I am well aware that for most critics and historians of French cinema the tendency is for classical French cinema to extend to the late 1950s and it is for this reason that I have termed these epochs ‘ages’ (so as to avoid confusion). I would then argue for the second age of cinema to span the period 1930-58 and be called French cinema’s age of modernism and finally for the period 1958 onward, until the next age, to be termed French cinema’s age of the postmodern. In any event, the chapters in this book will adopt this tripartite structuring of French cinema and each chapter will argue the case for these categories. Interestingly, the implementation in France of technological developments (first sound and then colour) also permits her cinema’s history to be carved up along tripartite lines and yields almost the same division – 1930 marking the first truly sonorised film, the mid 1950s the full implementation of colour. These technologies were first introduced by the Americans into their film industry in an attempt to counter waning audience attendance and were, therefore, in some respects ‘forced’ upon France (although, as will be argued in Chapter 3, the adoption of colour did not represent a problem for France in the way that sound did). Whatever the case, these technological implementations point once again to the duality of cinema

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Cinema was not an immaculate conception. It was born out of curiosity and financial necessity. To take the second point first, for a number of reasons, economic growth had declined since the Franco-Prussian war (1870). In losing the war, France lost the valuable industrially advanced AlsaceLorraine. In defeat, she had to make retribution to Prussia through indemnity payments. As a result of defeat, which was a tremendous blow to national pride, France stepped up her colonial expansion as a way of proving that she was still a great European power, but this merely compounded her problem. Given the poor state of her economy, a significant number of business people and industrialists refused to invest in the indigenous industry and chose rather to invest abroad, including the colonies. In the manufacturing industries new artefacts were invented to attract if not capital investment then at least attention to their novelty and potential use in many domains that would generate widescale sales of their products, a great majority of which were either entertainment artefacts (the phonograph) or had some scientific application (photographic film). Where the birth of cinema is concerned, on the economic side of the equation, the Cinématographe was launched for purely commercial purposes and in an endeavour to revitalise France’s ailing industry. By 1896, industrial growth was in the ascendant once more, going from 2.6 per cent per year for the period 1896-1906 to 5 per cent per year for 1906-13 – the very period that witnessed the meteoric emergence and world-wide monopoly of French cinema.